Pierre-Auguste Cot - Springtime [1873]

Pierre-Auguste Cot - Springtime [1873], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Cot (French, Bedarieux, 1837 - Paris, 1883), who received his academic training at the hands of Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Léon Cogniet, first exhibited at the Salon of 1863. For the next two decades he enjoyed success as a painter of allegorical and historical pictures and as a fashionable portraitist. This painting remains Cot’s most celebrated work. It was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon of 1873, which also featured Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr. John Wolfe bought both paintings after the close of the Salon and hung them side-by-side in his stately Manhattan residence.

A visitor to the Wolfe home described the flirtatious duo in Springtime as "in the most dangerous and inflammable of the teens…The cunning eagerness with which the maid looks right into the boy’s eyes is modern in meaning and antique in dress; hence the acceptability of this Arcadian idyll, peppered with French spice."

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 127 cm]